Web Spam Sites Must Die

I yearn for the day that certain obnoxious web entrepreneurs outgrow their proclivity to create Web Spam sites. These things are so tiresome and worthless...

For those not familiar with these idiotic wastes of bandwidth, let me educate you: Web Spam sites are pages made up of advertisements and links to other ad-laden websites. I’m not talking about sites that provide actual content surrounded by peripheral banner advertisements. I’m talking about sites whose main content is ad space. They pretend to offer assistance, information, or facts about a subject -- often an esoteric subject -- but once you look around these sites, you realize that their information is shallow, meaningless, not helpful, and written by people who don’t know anything about the subject. The sole purpose of these sites is to get inexperienced web users to click on the advertisements on their sites. Their creators have cleverly built their pages to get high rankings with the search engines, often by flooding their sites with search terms in various tricky ways, from data-mined menu items to "cloaking” text in invisible colors.

It works for them far too often. When you type a phrase like “anti mildew shower curtain” into a search engine, you often find a site that, on the surface, looks promising. The search result says something like, “End shower curtain mold and mildew with new technology curtains.” You click through to the site (http://www.e-showercurtains.com), in hopes of finding a real e-commerce site that sells shower curtains, only to find a site whose biggest contribution to giving you the information you need is the sentence you read back on the search result page. The rest of the site consists of endless repetition of the topic keywords, arranged in ever more creative ways, and it’s all surrounded by a patchwork of Google ads and links to yet more worthless, similar sites.

This kind of garbage is worse than e-mail spam. At least a spam message is easy to spot and wastes no more than a few seconds as you delete it. Chasing after elusive pages of actual, useful information while being distracted and misled by dozens of Web Spam sites consumes a significant amount of my time every day, and annoys me more than anything else about the Web.

Here another example: http://www.directoryaviation.com/. Notice the prominently-positioned Google ad. Notice the misspellings. Notice the fact that there is no content, other than links to other sites. It's all just blather, designed to produce the best Google Ads.

Here's another one: http://aircraftabc.com/. Check out the unbelievably-long menu in the left column that contains nearly every usage of the word "airplane" that exists in the world. This technique is specifically designed to capture a high ranking on Google so you'll stumble onto their page and maybe click on a Google advertisement, earning them a few pennies. This site is disgraceful, pathetic, and a serious regression of human intelligence.

Do yourself – and do the entire Web community - a favor, and don’t spend any time at Web Spam sites. When you recognize it’s Web Spam, just leave. Make the Web a better place by not encouraging this kind of behavior.